


While I lay dreaming

by DanzaNelFuoco



Category: Devilman (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Banned Together Bingo, Blasphemous Language, Canonical Character Death, Devilman Crybaby References, Devilman Crybaby Spoilers, Introspection, M/M, Translation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:42:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26668423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DanzaNelFuoco/pseuds/DanzaNelFuoco
Summary: The sky is clear and cloudless and bright.Ryo opens his eyes and knows he’s no longer Ryo.He could ignore this information: it didn’t go that well for him last time. And the previous one and the one before that and again. He’s destined to fail from the start.
Relationships: Asuka Ryo | Satan/Fudo Akira
Comments: 2
Kudos: 54
Collections: Banned Together Bingo 2020





	While I lay dreaming

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [While I lay dreaming](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17864036) by [DanzaNelFuoco](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DanzaNelFuoco/pseuds/DanzaNelFuoco). 



The sky is clear and cloudless and bright. 

Ryo opens his eyes and knows he’s no longer Ryo. 

He could ignore this information: it didn’t go that well for him last time. And the previous one and the one before that and again. He’s destined to fail from the start. 

After all, he’s fighting against Someone mightier than him - He had always been - ready to crush him and sent him back into the abyss. Ryo wonders why He keeps allowing him to come back then. 

It’s not even that Ryo  _ wants _ to come back - so maybe that’s his real punishment for trying to challenge him. Maybe God has fun building words just to have him destroying them, just to see him fail every single time, gloating in the divine wrath that rains on him and his demons at the end.

The sky is clear and cloudless and, even if it’s only past noon, in it there already is the pallid reflection of one of the four moons gravitating toward the planet. Ryo studied them at school but he was never able to distinguish them. Now that he remembers why they are here, he knows that that one is his third defeat. 

Einstein said that insanity is doing the same thing expecting different results. Ryo wonders if Einstein - or whoever in his place - is already born to say this in this universe. His memories always blur a little when he starts remembering. 

Ryo harbors the idea of closing his eyes and going back to be Ryo. 

But there’s another war to fight or he wouldn’t have awakened. 

He always wakes when the end is near. 

Sighing, he leaves the bench where he had his epiphany and, when he does, he’s not longer Ryo. 

He’s Lucifer.

* * * 

Akira Fudo is always unquestionably the same and Lucifer wonders what is so special in this little crybaby that Ryo and Amon like so much. 

It’s not that Lucifer’s no longer Ryo - he remembers perfectly everything, he didn’t possess the body of someone else, after all - it’s just that his mind is compartmentalized. Every single emotion felt by Ryo now has the taste of a child’s memories, long gone and withered, old pictures in sepia tones, no longer the interior tumult he had felt before opening his eyes. 

Lucifer knows he had loved Akira, Lucifer  _ still _ loves Akira, just in a different way. A way that doesn’t rule out maiming and blood and pain. 

* * * 

“Say, Akira, would you like became stronger?” Ryo sits like a broken ragdoll at the study table that Akira has occupied with his books, and lets the question be followed by a sharp smile, almost a grin, cutting, and dangerous. 

Akira doesn’t notice it, or he doesn’t care, and shrugs, his pale skinny limbs following in the gesture and Lucifer wonders  _ why him, what the hell is there, _ beside the rachitic appearance and the delicate smile and the soft eyes of someone empathizing with every single damn person in the universe, even the ones that don’t deserve it. 

“And good morning to you, too, Ryo!” Akira is calmer in this universe, more posed, even if he’s the same and he  _ can’t _ be any different. At least this time Ryo doesn’t have to save him from a street gang or something worse, like the crazy guy with a baseball bat, ready to break his head.

“So?” Ryo ignores him and his greeting, with his usual cockiness that shouts from rooftops ‘I know something you don’t’. 

“Stronger, Ryo? I don’t know. Why would I need it?” 

“Didn’t you like to run, when we were kids?” 

“I never had the right body for it.” Akira smiles, with the serenity of someone who has already come to terms with reality a long time ago. And Ryo gets caught off guard for the first time in… what? At least two lives? Maybe three. 

Because Akira used to run as a child, he remembers it. Akira had always run in every universe and why the hell doesn’t Akira run in this one, now that he’s more or less an adult? 

Lucifer wonders if he has missed some critical step in the years they’ve been apart - he wonders if it’s _ necessary, mandatory, fundamental  _ for him to be separated from Akira to awake, and what would happen if instead, he could remain with him for all his mortal life - if he would live as a human, as someone who doesn’t need and want to open the portals between the worlds and bring forth demons from their hibernation, just for them to make Earth their personal playground for that little wondrous lapse of time before angels swoop down on them to purify everything with fire. 

“Besides, I don’t really have time to go running,” Akira raises the book he was reading, before the childhood friend he hadn’t heard about for years barged at his table without even a hello, and shows him the cover, full of mathematical symbols Ryo remembers to have studied. At least two lives ago. 

“Are you an academic now?” 

“Not like you, Mr. Scholarship at twelve. But I’m trying,” Akira brushes it off. 

“Oh. So I’m guessing you’ll be too busy to come with me to a party tonight?” 

* * * 

It’s always like this with Akira. He doesn’t ask questions. Or at least, not the right ones. 

He doesn’t ask why Ryo is back - after three years without so much as a call, a text, or even a postcard - to ask him to go with him to a party. He didn’t ask the other times either, not even that time when the ‘party’ was merely a bloody pentagram drawn on the faded linoleum of a high school gym and Ryo had a knife in his hand and they were alone. That time they had sex. Or they  _ made love _ , as Akira put it afterward, the only time they talked about it, before pretending it was nothing. But how Akira could have used such a word for something like that, Lucifer had not understood. 

He had not understood that Akira had let himself be dragged with a half-smile on his face, indulging him like reed caves to the wind, only because he loved him. 

Laying at the center of the pentagram, naked under the cold neon light, blood pooling at the base of his neck where Ryo had sunk the knife, deep enough to cut but not to kill, Akira had kissed him, offering himself whole to his touch, his tongue, his pleasure, giving him the key to open the gates of Hell with a moan. 

And despite everything, even then, Akira hadn’t asked questions.

Sometimes Ryo wonders if his friend is really following the trite script that God had thrown in his hands, codifying it in his soul so deeply that, for how much Lucifer tries to improvise, everything always happens at it should; or - 

Or if Akira instead remembers, exactly as Lucifer does. 

But if Akira remembers - Akira who cries for a dog’s death, Akira who cries for the loneliness of the old woman living next door, Akira who cries for the sins of the world - why does he allow everything to happen as it always does? Why does he allow Ryo to bring Amon back and to continue this infinite and futile cycle of pain and death? 

After all, maybe Akira doesn’t remember. 

* * * 

Lucifer looks at Akira and sees Amon, hidden in the sparkles of his eyes, glimpsed in the cracks of his being, invisible to everyone except to him. 

If only there was someone else beside Ryo to care enough, it would be evident that Akira oozes Amon through every pore, in every single action - in the suddenly hypertrophic muscles, in the way he walks, his chin up, no longer dragging his feet, in the white points of his sharp fangs teeth. 

But not even one of Akira’s so-called ‘friends' seems to notice the difference, almost as if they were selectively blind to the growth spurt that made Akira a foot taller during the night. 

Lucifer wonders if Ryo was the only one to have ever actually  _ see _ Akira. 

* * * 

There’s blood flooding the earth, seeping in the soil till reaching the bowels of the earth, till reaching Hell, soaking the ground in crimson. And there’s shouting, yells and invocations raising to the sky, warcries and metal thumping, bodies falling to never get up again. There’s the sound of death resonating in every corner, the sound of severed bones and lacerated flash and evisceration. 

He had never thought death would be silent, but he didn’t remember it to be so loud. 

The moons grin mockingly, embedded in the black night. 

The world burns again. 

* * * 

Maybe he’ll ask him next time, before dragging him to the Sabbath that always marks the beginning of the end. 

Maybe he’ll ask him why he lets him call forth Amon. 

And maybe, maybe, Akira will tell him the truth. 

‘Because I can love Ryo, but I  _ can’t _ love Lucifer. Not alone.’

Even if this means the world will burn. 

* * * 

The sky is clear and cloudless and bright. 

The calm before the storm. 

There can’t be clouds to hinder the descent of angels. 

Lucifer turns his head, searching for the glassy eyes of Akira merged in Amon’s maimed body, black wings spread and blotched in blood and ichor, flesh torn from his chest. 

The four moons gleam in the sky, ready to greet a new sister. 

Lucifer closes his eye and wonders about the sense of this all. 

When he reopens them, he’s ready to be Ryo again. 

The first of the lights falls. 


End file.
